> The OP's Pete I have met many. It is exactly as described.
I don't think they are different, or at least that far apart.
I have a couple of Pete stories of my own. The last one I had a manager wanting a year's worth of work released in 3 months to meet nice-to-have deadlines. I explained that it was impossible to meet that requirement, but I offered an alternative solution that delivered a MVP in a couple of months but we would still need a year of intensive manual intervention alongside development work to get the system running. I repeated over and over the technical debt. He accepted the tradeoff.
After I delivered the MVP, that manager completely axed any follow-up development work and replaced it with four more ambitious projects. Now we have engineers wasting a few days of work per month doing manual maintenance tasks on top of project work because actually finishing the MVP is no longer in the roadmap.
Here's the kicker: what would happen if I left the company? Would I be singled out as the scapegoat for the MVP being a mess that's missing critical features? Would I be blamed for the project not working as presented by the manager to higher ups? Would I be vilified by the engineers tasked with doing grunt work for something that could be easily automated if a team worked on it for a few months?
I don't think they are different, or at least that far apart.
I have a couple of Pete stories of my own. The last one I had a manager wanting a year's worth of work released in 3 months to meet nice-to-have deadlines. I explained that it was impossible to meet that requirement, but I offered an alternative solution that delivered a MVP in a couple of months but we would still need a year of intensive manual intervention alongside development work to get the system running. I repeated over and over the technical debt. He accepted the tradeoff.
After I delivered the MVP, that manager completely axed any follow-up development work and replaced it with four more ambitious projects. Now we have engineers wasting a few days of work per month doing manual maintenance tasks on top of project work because actually finishing the MVP is no longer in the roadmap.
Here's the kicker: what would happen if I left the company? Would I be singled out as the scapegoat for the MVP being a mess that's missing critical features? Would I be blamed for the project not working as presented by the manager to higher ups? Would I be vilified by the engineers tasked with doing grunt work for something that could be easily automated if a team worked on it for a few months?